All posts tagged World War II

Your daily roundup of news from The Wall Street Journal related to Japan:

Japan expects tax revenue to reach its highest level in 24 years in the year starting April 2015. Higher corporate profits backed by a weak yen and cheap oil should allow firms to pay higher salaries. That would stimulate private consumption, government officials said. Read More »

Relations between Tokyo and Beijing appear to be on the mend, but disagreements over World War II legacy issues will likely continue to fester.

A prominent member of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s cabinet said Tuesday she intends to visit a controversial war memorial in Tokyo during its semiannual festival starting Friday. Sanae Takaichi, minister of internal affairs and communications, is the first state minister to say she will visit Yasukuni Shrine since Mr. Abe reshuffled his cabinet last month. Read More »

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, U.S. Ambassador to Japan Caroline Kennedy and representatives from nearly 70 countries and organizations on Wednesday attended the 69th anniversary of the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima during World War II.

This was Ms. Kennedy’s first visit to the city since assuming her post last November, and the fourth time that a U.S. ambassador was present at the memorial. Her predecessor, John Roos, attended the event for the first time as the ambassador in 2010 which stirred up debate in both U.S. and Japan. Read More »

Related News:

The agonizing issue of “comfort women” has burst back into the open with a controversial review by the Japanese government of its landmark 1993 apology to the victims.

Peipei Qiu, a professor of Chinese and Japanese at Vassar College, has offered new insights into one of the most traumatic aspects of Japan’s World War II aggression in a book co-authored with two China-based scholars.

As Chinese research into this brutal chapter of wartime history gathers intensity, Beijing is likely to become more vocal on an issue that already deeply divides Japan and South Korea. Read More »

China rejected complaints from Japan over China’s recent application to Unesco to preserve archives detailing the abuses that so-called “comfort women” suffered at the hands of the Japanese military during World War II. Read More »

Many books have described the militarist rhetoric and emperor worship that pervaded Japan in the years before and during World War II. Author Tadanori Hayakawa turns his attention to the sometimes-bizarre and lesser-known ways that imperial propaganda filtered down into Japanese daily life, drawing on his study of government documents, magazines and ad fliers from the 1930s and 1940s. Read More »

Tomiichi Murayama, the former socialist leader of Japan who apologized for Japan’s wartime aggression, is the latest ex-premier to come out of retirement and make current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe uncomfortable.

Mr. Murayama, who is celebrating his 90th birthday Monday, said in a recent visit to South Korea that he expects Mr. Abe to stick by the 1995 “Murayama statement” that contained the apology. Mr. Murayama also wants Japan to uphold a 1993 statement apologizing over the “comfort women” issue, made by Yohei Kono, Japan’s then-chief government spokesman. The term comfort women refers to women and girls, many of them Korean, who were forced to sexually serve Japanese soldiers during World War II. Read More »

Recent comments by Japan’s top government spokesman suggesting a possible re-examination of Japan’s apology for its involvement in the systematic exploitation of so-called “comfort women” is giving a boost to the country’s nationalists who insist that the imperial military never took part in forcing women and girls, many of them Korean, to sexually serve Japanese soldiers during World War II. Read More »

Just about the only issue that unites Korean politicians of all stripes, even those from North Korea and South Korea, is skepticism over former colonial master Japan.

The nationalist agenda of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has deepened that concern, particularly in the wake of his visit to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine and policy objectives seen in Seoul as inflaming long-running disputes tied to Japan’s 35-year occupation.

So the visit this week of Tomiichi Murayama, a former senior Japanese politician seen as a driver for better ties, has provided something of a break from the prevailing narrative of Japan’s dangerous right-wing lurch. Read More »

The shrine visited by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday has often been a lightning rod for criticism by Japan’s neighbors over the country’s wartime past.

The Shinto shrine, located in a Tokyo neighborhood near the political heart of the city, is the nation’s primary war memorial honoring 2.5 million Japanese killed since the late 19th century. It is visited by 5 million people annually, according to Yasukuni officials. Read More »

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